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How do you deal with a existential crisis? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by joucker29@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

143 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?

Rant: This has been keeping me up at night for way too long and every time I think about it I feel like am literally choking on my own thoughts. I have other shit to do but everything seems so inconsequential next to this. I just can't comprehend why or how the universe even exists or how a bunch of atoms can think or that quantum mechanics literally revealed that the world is not loaded when you are not looking like how tf do you know that I am observing something.

Btw I am not looking for a purpose in life although this may be interpreted as me asking for that.

If anyone has the same problem as me good luck my friend just know that you are not alone.

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[–] Glide@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Having this conversation with a friend once, he told me what helped him.

Do you remember anything from before you were born? The hundreds of thousands of years before your existence? Did you spend it experiencing nothing all before you finally were born and began to experience something? Of course not.

You've already done a millennia of non-existence. It wasn't painful, it wasn't boring, and it wasn't scary. You're not something that started and will eventually cease to exist. You are something that didn't exist, and then eventually, you did. Sure, you'll go back there one day, but that's just it: you're not going to a new place. You've been there before, and it was fine, just as it will be when you're there again.

[–] daanzel@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Reminds me of a quote I find kinda comforting:

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Mark Twain

[–] Zippy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now I am depressed about all that list time I can never get back.

[–] Glide@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

By the same logic, you have infinite more ahead of you.